Barry Hessenius on a New National Endowment

From a June 12 post on Barry's Blog:

I wonder how many tickets are sold in the aggregate to arts events in a given week across the whole country? In a month? Over the course of a whole year? Is that data available anywhere? Can we even make an educated guess? It must be a lot of people (tickets), and a substantial amount of money in the aggregate, despite not being what it once was or what it ought to be.

What if every organization were to voluntarily tack on an additional 50 cents to each ticket price, and earmark that money to a voluntary Endowment fund? What if everyone did that for five years? And what if we conservatively invested that money to grow that fund for that five years before even considering how to spend it? How much might it grow to in that five year period? Enough to constitute our own (small) National Endowment?

Read the full post here.